Gas From the Rain Forest

The company's chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, has been a major financial backer for President Bush, his father and other Republican candidates. Jeanne Phillips, Hunt Oil's senior vice president for corporate and international affairs, headed Bush's 2005 inaugural committee after serving two years as Bush's ambassador to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"There is a lot of dialogue with stakeholders inside the U.S. government," Phillips said. "We're doing everything we can to assure them this project is worthy of U.S. support."

Hunt was finance chairman of the Republicans' Victory 2000 Committee and is a member of the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group to Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman, as well as Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Together with his wife, Nancy, and his companies, Hunt has contributed about $1 million to President Bush and other Republican campaign committees since 1998.

Still, Hunt's political credentials did not prove strong enough to win U.S. support three years ago for financing of the pipelines, in which Hunt holds a smaller stake than in the new proposal. The Bush administration delegate at the Inter-American bank refused to support the financing, and the Export-Import Bank turned down the project.

Market conditions have changed radically since then, with a domestic natural gas shortage focusing attention on foreign sources. Since the last vote, the administration has also appointed a new executive director to the Inter-American bank, Hector E. Morales Jr., who has publicly called for the bank to play a more active role in facilitating Latin America's gas exports to the United States.

Hunt, which holds a 50 percent share in the new project, Peru LNG, plans to seek $400 million in loans from the Inter-American bank directly, as well as the bank's help in facilitating up to $400 million from private commercial banks. Hunt's partners in the project are SK Corp. of South Korea and Repsol YPF of Spain.

The company has not yet formally submitted applications at either the Inter-American bank or the Export-Import Bank, but officials at both institutions said preliminary discussions were underway.

Company spokeswoman Phillips said she did not anticipate any problems with the environmental impact study because the project was "not in an environmentally sensitive area." But environmental groups say the planned export terminal in Paracas Bay poses a threat to Peru's only marine reserve there.

A coalition of environmental groups wrote to Hunt in December condemning his company's failures to prevent "unnecessary harm" to the local people and the tropical rain forest by failing to use certain advanced drilling technology to minimize the number of wells. The coalition includes Amazon Watch, Amazon Alliance, Environmental Defense, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam America and the World Wildlife Fund.

Steve Suellentrop, the official in charge of Hunt's liquid natural gas projects, said the consortium had addressed all issues raised by the indigenous people and that "the alleged impact is much greater than the real impact."

"Nobody was directly impacted," he said. "Maybe indirect."

Suellentrop said the consortium operating the field, in which Hunt holds a 25 percent interest, had used "directional drilling" techniques, which he said were similar to the "extended reach drilling" advocated by environmental groups.